Author Archives: Scott Foglesong

When life hands you a lemon, make lemonade. The repressive laws concerning women on the Elizabethan stage were lemons galore. Only men could act onstage in Shakespeare’s England. Lady Macbeth was played by a guy. So was Cleopatra. So was … Continue reading →

This is the time in the calendar when the school year is winding down. Once again I find myself wondering what in tarnation’s the matter with certain fool kids. Certain fool kids who fail classes that they could have passed … Continue reading →

It’s one of those infamous musical events that everybody has heard about but nobody much has ever heard. A 1962 performance of the Brahms D Minor Piano Concerto by Glenn Gould and the New York Philharmonic led to conductor Leonard … Continue reading →

The Absolute Sound was a catchphrase of the late Harry Pearson, guru-par-excellence of the modern audiophile movement. Harry’s dictum was that the absolute sound was the sound of acoustic music played in a natural space and therefore the goal of … Continue reading →

A dyed-in-the-wool orchestra wonk rummaging through, and listening to, 65 compact discs covering the last fifty years of the Vienna Philharmonic as recorded by those spiffy engineers at Decca: we’re talking hog heaven, pure and simple. The Vienna Philharmonic isn’t … Continue reading →

Among the most pernicious buzzwords encountered in audiophile journalism is blackness. By this is meant a lack of background noise such as buzzing or hissing or really anything. You’d think that would be a non-issue these days, but given the … Continue reading →

I make absolutely no bones that I’m almost married to my computer. I use my digital tools with abandon and with a certain amount of skill, if I do say so myself. At home I’m likely to be found in … Continue reading →

It was a special treat, a minor-league family ritual, and now a faded memory. It required dressing up in my only suit, complete with clip-on fake tie and a collar just tight enough to cause sensations of suffocation. The good … Continue reading →

You know you’re an audiophile when you try listening to your laptop’s built-in speaker for the first time in months and it makes you physically ill. I picked that little gem up off an audiophile discussion board where members were … Continue reading →

I reach the end of yet another semester. Thirty six years in the professorial saddle; ergo, this was my seventy-second semester teaching collegiate students. That’s an awful lot of class time. You’d think I would have it down pat by … Continue reading →